


To Certain Poor Shepherds In Fields As They Lay

by Merixcil



Series: Advent Fics 2018 [4]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Flashpoint (Comics)
Genre: Blood and Gore, F/M, Murder, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:48:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25204987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: St Mungo's is far too quiet for Christmas
Relationships: Batman/Joker, Martha Wayne/Thomas Wayne
Series: Advent Fics 2018 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1824643
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	To Certain Poor Shepherds In Fields As They Lay

**Author's Note:**

> Ok so I finished the Flashpoint proper storyline this morning (and cried) but I read the Batman tie in a couple of weeks back and ADORED it. Thomas and Martha as Batman and The Joker is just too good. Though neither of them are referred to by their super-aliases in this

Religion as a whole never held much sway in Gotham. Too much else going on, too much blood in the streets to believe that a higher power sincerely cared. You can tell a new immigrant to this city by the strength of their faith, and an old one by how bitter they are at its untimely passing. The lifers have given up all together.

The big exception being the Catholic Church, forever thriving on the force of the guilt it instils in its followers and their hopeless belief that all will be forgiven if they come crawling back to the confessional, week after week. Like a battered wife, smiling around a black eye and a bloody nose. They deserve it, they tell themselves, they had it coming. 

St Mungo’s is dead silent after dark. Thomas wouldn't pay it any mind but it's Christmas Eve and Midnight Mass is supposed to be in full swing. The burying of bodies within city limits was outlawed some twenty years back, and the relatives of the people who have lain here in death since time immemorial have either moved on or lost faith. The headstones groan and shudder with every new development in the neighbourhood, smothered in lichen so thick that even if the names of their occupants hadn’t been worn away by the wind, it still wouldn’t be possible to read them. 

The gate to the graveyard creaks as Thomas lets it fall back on its hinges, the crunch of gravel beneath his boots and the cape lighting up the night more clearly than the glare of his casino from across the bay. He could play stealth, he’s tried in plenty of times, but the door to the church is wide open and she never makes a show of her presence if she wants to play cat and mouse. 

She always did wear the trousers, or so Oswald says. 

Churches are always cold, his mother told him, when he used to complain about the chill on Christmas morning. Heating them is too expensive. Well, it’s Midnight and the place is frigid. The first set of doors marks the barrier between the dull light coming in off the street lamps and the flickering glow of the candles beyond. The electric lights overhead are out, but Thomas been expecting that, he approached the building from the north and saw where she ripped the generator off its hinges. 

Her or someone. Someone she paid, someone she killed. One and the same more often than not. 

There are only so many deep breaths a man can take, so many times he can steal himself before stepping out onto the scene of a tragedy, before he learns that you can’t prepare yourself. Either it knocks the wind out of you or it doesn’t, every damn time. 

Most of them made it back to their pews before whatever she put in the communion wine hit them, but there are a handful of bodies strewn across the aisle all the same, hands still stretched out, reaching for their loved ones. The black and white tiles are picked out in blood, still fresh enough to seep and Thomas knows that if he really cared he could scan this wreckage for a heartbeat. They wouldn’t live though, not for long. 

Father Marcus is on his back, having tripped down the dias from the altar, on the way to tend to his dying flock. The last time Thomas came down here in person he was after one of the man’s colleagues. Cliche, perhaps, only this low life was running drugs through the Sunday School, using kids as his mules. Thomas didn’t like that, and if anyone ever thinks to properly dredge the harbour they might see the sum total of his displeasure. 

The priest’s mouth hangs open, tongue lolling down his cheek. His corpse cries bloody tears, and the shine of his crucifix is marred by red. 

Thomas doesn’t even flinch, he’s seen this all before. It’s supposed to look like Bruce and in a lazy, unrefined sort of way he supposes it does. Like playing word association, he sees this and he thinks death and in death he thinks of the son he lost but there’s too much mess, too many people, and not enough rain. When she gets it just right, she can cripple him with a glance but when she gets it wrong it’s all a bad joke. 

“The first Noel, the Angels did say, was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay.” Her voice grates. She used to be such a wonderful singer but when she took that straight razor to her cheeks she fucked up her timbre and laughed her vocal chords down to nothing. 

Up atop the altar, dressed in gold to mark the happy occasion and stained with the remnants of the poisoned chalice, Martha lies, stretched out carefully so as not to knock over the candles lining each end. She turns her head, winks an emerald eye. “Get it? Shepherds. And these were their lovely little sheeple.”

She throws out an arm, indiscriminately gesturing to the whole church. When she laughs, the sound shatters like glass, tripping off the high ceilings. 

Thomas doesn’t let his feet stop moving till he reaches the dias, looking up towards Martha framed perfectly in candle light and the specks of colour still visible from the stained glass windows behind her. When she first started this she would steal suits from the back of his wardrobe, starting with the older, rattier numbers that he wouldn’t notice missing and becoming more bold as the months rolled by. Now she wears trousers tailored as close to her form as a men’s cut will allow. She wears the long purple coat he bought her for their tenth wedding anniversary, and he’s never been able to find out who she gets to dry clean it but there’s never so much as a speck on it. 

Her roots are showing through the green dye, and she hasn’t had a haircut since June. Thomas wishes that he didn’t keep track of that sort of thing. The candle light takes pity on him though, casting her pale cheeks in uniform orange, so that if he didn’t know exactly where the hills and valleys of her scars were he might be able to persuade himself that they never existed. 

Martha sits up in a rush, and it’s all gone. Her head tips forward and her hair hides her face. Sometimes, he wonders if she’s not ashamed of what she’s done to herself. 

“Why?” He asks. 

She shrugs, barks off a short round of titters. “I knew you’d come. I was hoping to make a real party out of this, but no one brought their kids along.” 

Thomas winces. He doesn’t need to see it, he knows the look. Martha holding her sacrifice down on the altar, the straight razor in place, asking him what he would do to save the child and the answer is always anything, anything my love. I would break time in two. 

There is never anything he can do. So in the stories he tells Gordon she is slippery, she is fast, she is clever. She is not mad, she has something more on her mind than the blood. 

He takes a step up the dias and she doesn’t flinch away. His hand, heavy and dark and encased in a gauntlet, too unyielding to properly be thought of as human, tries to brush her hair aside, and it falls back into place. 

Martha’s eyes shine, even in the shadows. “Getting sentimental on me, Tommy boy?” 

“Always.” 

“You hate me yet?”

“No.”

“Liar.” 

She would bite him, could probably take his finger clean off if she wanted to, but the gauntlets are too thick. So she settles for fixing her teeth to one of the carbon fibre ears of the cowl, growling under her breath. A hand on Thomas’s shoulder, a hand on the back of his neck. And if he wanted to hold her, he thinks, sometimes, she would let him. 

“Don’t suppose you saved me a seat next to the God botherer you took out of here last month?” Martha asks. 

“Maybe.” Thomas replies, the closest he ever gets to coy. Every child knows that when the parent says ‘maybe’ they mean ‘no’. 

With her hands already on him, she has all the leverage she needs. Martha pushes him, and the steps of the dias are just steep enough for Thomas to stumble. Just to stumble, never to fall. She leaps over his head with catlike elegance, and then she’s running away down the aisle, leaving him alone at the altar. Her coat fans out behind her, skimming the tops of the bodies in her wake. 

Thomas was nowhere near as careful. The cape has dragged the blood of these people into a thick stain across the tiles. He will spend most of Christmas day trying to scrub it out by hand. 

He will spend most of Christmas eve on his feet. He catches his balance and sets off after her, but he already knows that by the time he hits the front gate, Martha will be gone. And all he’ll have left will be her dresses, and her jewellery, and her perfume, and a side of the bed he refuses to sleep on, and a grave at the bottom of the garden marked _Bruce Wayne_. 

Thomas has gotten used to spending Christmas alone. 

**Author's Note:**

> This work was originally posted as part of a multi chaptered 'advent fics' fic that I'm trying to split up. If you think you've read it before, you probably have
> 
> Comments on the previous posting of this fic (just ask if you want me to remove yours) include:
> 
> >melody1987: Gory and tragic and beautiful all in one! I would LOVE to read more of these two from you.  
> >>Merixcil: Thank you!! I just......love the whole concept of flashpoint batjokes....i could really fall off the deep end here.....
> 
> >racingincircles: Thomas/Martha in BatJokes form is my current favorite ship because it's so complex and dysfunctional and so far this is the best thing I've read about them.  
> >“Getting sentimental on me, Tommy boy?”  
> >“Always.”  
> >“You hate me yet?”  
> >“No.”  
> >“Liar.”  
> >That is exactly how I imagine their dialogue. It's basically canon that Thomas never loses his feelings for Martha and I like the little details like him knowing when her last haircut was and her coat being an old anniversary gift. Clearly there's a part of her that still has feelings for him too.  
> >"And if he wanted to hold her, he thinks, sometimes, she would let him." And I'm dead.  
> >>Merixcil: Flashpoint BatJokes really is *chef's kiss* I want so much from this concept and yet canon gives me so little  
> >>I don't suppose you have other fic recs for this pairing? It's awfully hard to work out how to access the Flashpoint only version of these two.  
> >>I'm so pleased you liked this though. I would be lying if I said I wasn't still rather pleased with it  
> >>>racingincircles: Ohhhh do I have fic recs all right. Sorry it took a million years for me to respond, I've been pretty busy.  
> >>>First, check out two of my three most recent bookmarks. I stumbled across the earlier one about a month ago and that's how I fell down this Flashpoint BatJokes rabbit hole, even though it's not explicitly Flashpoint. You're right that it's hard to track down this AU on this site when they're not all sorted the same way.  
> >>>Other fics:  
> >>>Ch. 17 of "The Unfinished Business of the Gray Son" by GraySonOfGotham  
> >>>Ch. 4 of Batjokes Week Ficlets by JupiterMelichios  
> >>>"Her Hate, His Love" by BadgerDame  
> >>>"Paint It Black" by TheBlackCatCrossing (a fix-it fic)  
> >>>"Desiderium" by Misstring, which I haven't read yet but I'm looking forward to it  
> >>>"Past the Point" is not on AO3 but on fanfiction.net, and it has a twist I didn't see coming  
> >>>Also worth noting: "And I, I Will Poison The Skies" by AshToSilver, not a Flashpoint AU, but Martha's character arc is partly inspired by it. None of the Waynes die, and Thomas and Martha are a background pairing, but we get to see quite a bit of Martha's dark side. I don't know why DC comics writers haven't capitalized on the opportunity Flashpoint gave them. They're too focused on the men's stories, I guess.  
> >>>And my most recent bookmark gives me all the feels if you're interested. It's not Flashpoint and is really just a pre-canon fluff-fest, but I'll take whatever fic about Thomas and Martha's marriage I can get, and I'm sure the references to her inner darkness aren't coincidence.  
> >>>I'm so glad someone else is as invested in this very limited ship as I am. Although it's more of a canoe than a ship. :)  
> 


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